


Cloudstepper

by Bluebird5555



Category: The Owl House (Cartoon)
Genre: Amity Blight Has a Crush, Clouds, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, the meaning of being
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 08:02:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28507149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluebird5555/pseuds/Bluebird5555
Summary: "Do you ever wonder where clouds go?" Luz asks.And Amity listens; she may not even know where she's going, but perhaps the clouds know the way. She's done running. Maybe the sky is just wide enough for her to fly.
Relationships: Amity Blight/Luz Noceda
Comments: 8
Kudos: 49





	1. Cloudstepper

The bones of the Isles, Amity’s always felt, have a life within them that few see. They reach towards the sky in the midst of maelstroms. They curl towards their centers in the heart of winter, as if to shelter the island’s denizens from even a little of the weight of the snow. There’s a song somewhere in the hollows of their marrow. She’s heard the way the tides whistle between the Titan’s wrist bones. The winds that night had been cold upon the coast. Demons had carved their claims into the cartilage. She’d been convinced, standing there amidst the stones, that if she could have listened for just a little while longer, she might have been able to make out the words.

Right now, the Titan protests the drawing near of sunset. Its ribs cast their longest shadows across the belly of the land. The darkness filters through the branches above Amity’s head and mingles with the red of the leaves. Failing light dances upon the paper of her textbook in vermilions.

She turns a page. _The Irony of the Star-Chewer, Glutton of Worlds,_ the chapter reads: an account of a conqueror felled by a peanut allergy. Multiple choice questions dot the margins of the page. The Demon Realm always had a curious way of resisting any efforts at control.

Maybe it’s irony, the way the Isles seem most alive after a plague. The morning’s boiling rains have brought new shoots, hemoglobin-red, from beneath the litterfall. The forest is sharp with the smells of sulfur and ozone and tea, and the trees, steeped in rainwater, shed the ancient iron from their leaves.

She thinks of how each leaf will rust and dwindle and bleed back into the earth; the way they’ll heal again in the dark of the Titan’s bones. The iron of wildwoods past lifts the new buds off the forest floor and colors the blood in her veins.

There’s a shifting in the boughs above her. Luz peers downwards from her perch atop a branch, leaves dusk-red around her shoulders, eyes bright in the forest’s preternatural night.

And Amity amends, in the breath of the moment before Luz speaks: Maybe it’s not irony at all. The clouds haunt the skies in the wake of the rains, and the most beautiful parts of the Isles emerge to watch them pass by.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Softly, Amity settles against the tree at her back. Its roots, stained with burgundy moss, rise around her from the forest floor. The strange idiom has her crinkling her brow, but the meaning gets through. Still, though — “Thinking you should be studying instead of using your made-up words on me,” she deflects, lowering her gaze quietly from the ribs arcing through the sky. The motion is practiced. Hiding the wanderings of her thoughts comes to her like a second skin.

Luz rears back in indignation. The deflection strikes true. “I’m not making up anything! Pennies are real things, I swear! I’ll bring one back here for you to see one day, and you’ll all rue the day you decided to doubt me!”

Unaffected, Amity flips a page. “Just like the Rubik’s cubes, the emails, New Zealand, and artichokes?”

“Some of those might be a little harder to do than the others,” Luz concedes to herself. A moment later, the wind redoubles in her sails. “I’ll get a map! Or the prime minister! I’ll wow your facile minds.” The branch beneath her rustles as she springs to her feet, sunlight cascading around her heroic pose. “You’ll all be sorry you ever crossed Luz Noceda!”

“Yep,” Amity sighs. She inspects the nails of one hand. “Pretty sorry right now I ever crossed paths with you.”

A few minutes and a compromise later (“I’ll accept your ‘pennies’ — so long as you admit that artichokes are ludicrous make-believe”), Amity inclines her head towards the sheaf of notes abandoned where branch meets tree. “My point still stands, though. That Potions exam won’t study for itself.”

The noise of dismissal that Luz makes rustles the leaves of the canopy above her. “Potions, shmotions. I already _know_ how to pour all the things into all the other things.”

“Truly, the mark of a top student,” Amity murmurs drily; but she knows, despite her words, that Luz really is more than prepared, and that even if she weren’t, the sheer force of her enthusiasm for magic would carry her through. Amity hadn’t thought it was possible, that anyone could care for learning in such earnest — but then Luz had appeared in her life, and had cared for _everything_ around her with total abandon. Every school of magic had merited her attention. Everyone she met had deserved her unwavering faith — even Amity — even the witch who’d long before lost faith in herself.

If she presses down just a little harder than necessary when turning the next page — well. The trees keep the secret in the wood of their rings.

Above her, Luz stifles a chuckle. “I wouldn’t dream of taking that title from you.” She picks up her notes, sifts halfheartedly through the alchemical diagrams, and then, with a sound of resignation, flops back against the tree again. “Really, though. Some days just aren’t meant for studying.”

She lifts a hand skywards, and Amity’s gaze follows. Sunset blooms across the clear spaces between the leaves.

“Look at the sky, and the colors, and the giant bones, and — _everything.”_ Luz punctuates the word with a sweep of her arms outwards. The leaves of the branch beneath her whisper in the breeze. “It’s all so incredible. Sometimes, I still can’t believe that I’m really here. Everything may want to eat you, and probably has too many eyes, but I’ve never seen anything like it.” Her next words fall with reverence. “Not even in my dreams.”

It kills Amity, in moments like these, how freely Luz entrusts her with the sincerest of her thoughts. It bewilders Amity every time how much Luz can make the simplest words mean.

“It is,” Amity manages quietly in response. “Incredible, that is.” ( _You are,_ she nearly says —) She ducks her head forcibly towards her textbook. Hair falls across her eyes from the violence of the motion. The history of the Demon Realm swims across the pages, the meaning of its empires and wars suddenly elusive. Was reading always this hard?

“You really think?” comes the inquiry, hesitant, from the leaves.

Amity looks up. The last of the sunlight frames Luz like a halo. The clouds are golden against the wonder in Luz’s eyes and the softness with which she looks at Amity.

It’s funny: Amity could have sworn there was solid ground beneath her a moment ago. The forest seems to float towards the watercolor of the sky. Somewhere along the ascent, the last of her cognition jabs her in the side, and she nods, not trusting herself to speak.

She watches as Luz leans back against the tree, leaf-light and sun-shadow tangling around her silhouette. She waits as considerations flicker across Luz’s face, as she casts her eyes upwards through the weave of the trees.

The leaves trail like constellations across the forest canopy.

“Do you ever wonder where clouds go?” Luz asks quietly.

Very profoundly, Amity blinks. “Clouds?” she repeats.

“Yeah. Clouds.” Luz brings a hand up to the back of her head as she speaks. “A lot of things here are new and kind of crazy to me, but the clouds are still the same. They always seem like they’re going somewhere. I could never figure out where that was.” She turns, as if remembering something, to gaze out across the shadowscape of the understory. “They were always my favorite thing to watch back at home.”

The word catches Amity’s attention. Her ears perk up at the sound: _home._ Discreetly, she lets her book fall shut. For all that Luz may run her mouth, she never speaks of the world from which she came.

“After school,” Luz says, “around this time of day, I’d always sit and watch the clouds go by. You couldn’t really see them a lot of the time with all the buildings in the way, not like you can here, but I’d make do. You can fill in the spaces with your imagination. Sometimes I’d bring a book, or draw.” She picks up her Potions notes with a small smile. “Sometimes I’d study. Actually, I didn’t realize, but I guess that’s part of the reason why I dragged you out here with me. The clouds are the prettiest after it rains.”

Maybe Amity’s died, and whatever remains of her spirit is leaving for the next life. It might explain why her heart wants to rise towards the stars.

“I didn’t know anyone could be so happy about a plague,” she manages to mumble at last. Luz only beams, as if given a great compliment.

There are mushrooms, now, emerging timidly from their hiding spots as the sun recedes from the theater of the sky. Some glow in the curls of the roots around Amity. Some blink the sleep from their eyes. She looks up at the clouds, iridescent in the light of the setting sun. They drift towards the end of the sky like fragments of another world.

Lightly, she digs a hand into the soil beneath her, nearly airy with rainwater. That hadn’t been what she’d wanted to say; not really.

Light falls in cataracts through the prism of the leaves. She sweeps the back of her hand across the cover of her book: an artist’s rendition of the passage of history, witches in the wild of the ancient woods, the salt and smoke of their wars. She takes a steadying breath. It trembles beneath its weight in the liveliness of the air.

The last remnants of the rainwater drip from the forest around her — a quiet song.

She closes her eyes.

“They _are_ pretty,” she says, quietly. “I think I used to watch the rain like that when I was younger. Ed and Em and I, we’d sneak out in the middle of storms to feel the wind, and to see the lightning above the waves. Everything always looked so… different, in the rain.” She quirks an eyebrow after a moment of thought. “Probably because it was being boiled alive.”

Leaves shuffle, softly, in the boughs above her. “You think you used to?”

“It was a very long time ago.” A faint huff of amusement escapes Amity. “Let’s just say our force field spells weren’t very good. After Edric came back with half his hair burnt off, our parents caught on and forbade us from ever sneaking out again. We usually make a point nowadays to stay away from the outdoors after a plague —” Here, she opens her eyes to shoot Luz a very pointed look — “So… I’d nearly forgotten what it was like.”

The clouds are heavy with waters unwept, so low in the sky that they seem nearly to brush the treetops.

“They look so close you could almost touch them.” Her words are light as frost. “Wouldn’t it be nice to be up there?”

There’s been a strange expression upon Luz’s face while Amity speaks. She blinks rapidly now, as if remembering herself. “Yeah,” she echoes distantly. “Wouldn’t that be nice.” Balanced in the canopy’s shifting twilight, she reminds Amity in that moment of a forest sprite.

A chill breeze, harbinger of the lengthening dark, scuds by, and Amity drops her gaze to her textbook again, suddenly self-conscious. The fallen leaves scatter before the insistence of the wind. The ancient earth shivers.

She doesn’t know why she shared any of that. She grits her teeth. The breath is tight in her chest.

Stiffly, she flips through the pages. She tries to remember which battle in the Tumescent Tussle she’d left off at. The words are nearly indecipherable now in the gloom. Shroom-lights wink to life in ghostly blues in the sun’s wake.

She thinks, unbidden, of the sound of the rain. The electricity of thunderstorms distantly recollected crackles across her fingertips. She remembers how she’d laughed as Emira had pulled her by the hand through puddles.

She shuts her eyes again. Something shakes in her breath as she lets the pages fall from her grip.

The ghost of the rain curls around her in the wind.

What are the storms in the human realm like? She wonders if the earth there rises to meet each lightning strike as well. She thinks of Luz alone beneath an alien sky, peering up through buildings so tall as to blot out the clouds.

Her chest is tight now for a different reason. The feeling falls like a star, like snow. She looks up, leaf-husks cascading around her in the breeze.

The branch above her is empty.

Heart leaping from her chest, Amity surges to her feet. “Luz?” The leaves whisper in response. When did the forest get so dark? _“Luz!”_

Her stomach plunges in the ensuing silence. How could she have not been on the lookout for demons? How could she have not been on the lookout for _Luz?_ She rushes into the dark of the trees. Scarcely a few steps in, she stumbles over a furrow in the ground.

She stops. Her eyes trace the fresh trail as it carves across the forest floor to form the largest glyph she’s ever seen.

The brush rustles. Luz emerges, dragging the end of a branch through the soil. She terminates her pattern with a triumphant jab earthward. She leaps into the air.

There’s truth in the old saying: Amity’s life really does flash before her eyes. _“Luz, what are you doing, NO —"_

 _“AND LIFT-OFF!”_ Luz cries as she hits the forest floor.

A seismic rumbling rises through the island from the Titan’s core. The forest floor glows like the forge of a star.

Amity grabs hold of the nearest tree.

The forest explodes in a cataclysm of leaf and light, and the earth tears asunder before a colossal cylinder of ice. Ripping the trees above it from the ground, it soars towards the sky, crystalline prisms blooming jagged from its sides and spirals of ice wreathing around its form like vines. The swathe of forest at its apex is borne unwillingly with it into the sky. Amity might be screaming. She can’t tell for sure. She considers seriously evaluating her social choices. At least with Boscha, she’d never needed to fear being torn bodily from the face of the earth.

Just as quickly as it’d started, the ascent of the pillar begins to slow. Loops and arcs of ice twirl through the sky like the weave of spring flowers, the wheeling flight of birds. With a last, resounding shudder, the column rumbles to a halt. Wild magics ripple in auroras across its surface, sealing the ice in place; and the world resettles, and stills once more.

The silence, sudden, is deafening.

Bits and pieces at a time, Amity comes back to herself. Her limbs are still intact. The bark of the tree she’s clinging to is dry beneath her grip.

Hesitantly, she cracks open one eye.

What’s left of the forest around her clings to life with its last breath. Trees teeter and skew as if clawed through by a cyclone. Leaves flutter in a daze from the air-blasted canopy. A flock of disgruntled demons, nearly smashed out of the sky by the pillar, flaps overhead, spitting sibilant curses and cries at the ice.

With an eruption of leaves, Luz lurches out from beneath a snarl of brush. “Woah-hoh-hoh,” she says, stumbling in unsteady circles. “I can’t feel my sense of direction anymore.”

Amity sees red.

“Luz…” The bark splinters beneath her grip. _“What have you done?”_

Luz freezes in her swaying tracks. She turns, hunched, to look back over her shoulder, eyes very, very wide. “H-hey, Amity… Long time no see! How are you liking the, uh, weather… around these parts… of the sky?”

Cracks begin to fracture outward through the wood of the tree.

Luz laughs very nervously.

_“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING? WERE YOU EVEN THINKING AT ALL? HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO GET BACK DOWN? DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO MY GRADES IF I DIE HERE?”_

Luz appears to be trying to melt into the forest. She shrinks back into the brush with every word. “I didn’t know the ice would go so high. The spell wasn’t supposed to just _keep on going._ I mean, I have been training, and _sure,_ I may have added some teensy modifications to the glyph that probably shouldn’t have been there, but believe me, I had no intention of sending us up into the lower atmosphere.”

Amity’s eye twitches.

“The lower _what?”_

All of the color drains at once from Luz’s expression. “You didn’t know how high up we actually were, did you,” she whispers.

Amity whips her gaze towards the ice’s edge. The trees of the forest seem very small from this distance.

Something seems to be funny with Amity’s vision. She lets her forehead fall against the tree as spots begin to swim before her eyes.

“We’re actually going to die up here,” she whispers.

There’s a shuffling of brush — a muted sound. Luz moves as if to cross the ice towards Amity, but stops herself. The fragments of leaves and twigs caught upon her clothes trail in her wake like dragon’s scales.

She seems to lose the war with herself. She looks down, grabbing her forearm loosely. “Hey.” The word might vanish against the silence of the sky. “I’m sorry.”

The air is cold in the iridescence of the setting sun, and Amity’s breath rises from her in thin mists. She looks up.

“You’re right. I wasn’t thinking.” The shadows cast by the remnants of the trees spill around Luz as she speaks. “Magic is a privilege, and it needs to be used responsibly. I’m still not used to the freedom or the danger that comes with being able to cast spells. I don’t know if I’ll ever be.” Her eyes are pleading — not for forgiveness, but for something from the trees around them — as she looks at Amity. “I could’ve hurt you.”

Amity wonders why she can’t put name to the feeling weaving between her bones.

“So… I’m sorry,” Luz says again. The ice gleams from beneath the soil in patches, splashes of glacial color, like puddles. “I just —” She drops her gaze. She seems to crystallize, closing in on herself, like the ice, fathomless, beneath her feet. “I just wanted to bring the sky to you.”

Frost feathers, cartilage-white, cling to the red of the leaves falling around them. Amity almost fears to breathe: Luz might shatter.

 _She_ might shatter.

She closes her eyes against the aging light.

She remembers the twining flight of the rain.

The sky falls away around her.

Carefully, she unwinds her grip from around the tree. She looks, for the first time, at the vastness of the space around them. Her eyes widen.

She crosses the distance, wordlessly, to Luz, and leads her out to the edge of the ice, where the darkness of the tree cover breaks.

“Huh?” Luz mumbles, blinking against the sudden light. “What —” She breaks off sharply as the sun dazzle clears from her eyes.

Clouds tumble around them from the globe of the sky. They tower like mountains. They spill like worlds. Sunlight suffuses their feathers, rose and ethereal gold. Mists wreathe through the air in garlands. The sky hangs suspended, sun-stained, the dream of a Titan.

Amity stands, motionless as the ice beneath. The setting sun washes across her in a palette of gold.

Beside her, Luz seems nearly to collapse on the spot. “Oh my gosh.” Roseate light tangles in her hair. “It’s _beautiful.”_

She takes a halting step forward, and then another, leaves swirling past her towards the open sky like petals. “It’s so beautiful,” she says again, as if unable to help herself. “Eda took me and King up here once, when I first got to the Boiling Isles. I never thought —” Her voice buckles. Tentatively, almost as if afraid, she pads towards the very edge of the ice and sinks to her knees, heedless of the cold. She trails a hand through the mists drifting past the pillar. They lap in gentle motion against the ice. They unfurl like a snowfield towards the horizon. “I never thought I’d be back here, without a staff of my own.”

Amity stands. Leaves coat the ice around her in red. Her breath rises from her in the cold of the air towards the clouds. She lifts a hand up before her, as if seeing it anew. Twilight dances between her fingers. The last of the sun drifts beneath the sea.

“Hey.”

Amity blinks the raindrops from her vision. Clouds pile around her towards the first of the stars.

Luz looks back over her shoulder, silhouetted by afterlight. “Everything alright?” she asks, attentive, but without pressure.

Amity gathers herself for a moment. “Yes. I’m — alright.”

Night drifting downwards from faraway space, Amity makes her way across the ice. The sky looms large around her as she lowers herself carefully to sit by Luz’s side.

The first of the lights have begun to wink on across the Isles. The last of the sunset, strewn across the arc of the sky, donates its colors to the mists around Amity even as it fades. Amity looks out, one more time, across the vast, quiet world of the clouds. Even at this height, the tallest of the Titan’s bones rise beyond her. Distantly, she sees that their points are wreathed in snow.

 _Alright._ Never has she felt any word so inadequate. How can she describe the way it feels to come back to life?

Beside her, Luz lowers her gaze from the budding stars. Half a world above the ground, she flashes Amity a lopsided smile, warm enough to light up the clouds.

And suddenly, it’s alright. Some part of Luz belongs up here too. There are bones upon the horizon and the blood of ancient forests in Amity’s veins. The clouds form a canopy above their heads: shelter from the sky.


	2. Inertia

_Hiss._

Hexside is bright beneath the midday sun. Its white stone and high, arched windows catch the light like a star.

Lunchtime means no runic recitations or bardic orchestras drift outwards from the school; no potions rise in fogs around its spires. A griffin soars above the grudgby stadium, and a handful of students pass a ball across the enchanted field beneath its shadow. The banners above the school’s entrance flutter in the wind. The great, unblinking eye in the belfry turns its gaze out across the hills, the rolling woods beneath the mountains of snowy bone.

In the trees off to the side of the school, the light reaches the ground in patches. Clouds of deep violet brush float amidst the trees, and the tall, crimson grasses bow before the breeze, rippling around Amity.

_Hiss._

A frustrated growl escapes Amity as she pores over the tome balanced on her knee. Velvet moss blankets the log beneath her, and its feathers, breath-light, reach towards the trees. Books pile atop the log and strew through the grass, opened to astronomical charts and biological treatises, histories of the geology of the Isles.

With a sharp huff, she snaps the book shut, and lays it to the side. She blinks away, furiously, the fog of exhaustion weighing upon her mind. The shadows of the trees dance around her, their leaves flowing like water in the wind. She sets her jaw, and lifts her hand into the air. The sunlight sways in patterns around her form as she draws a spell circle.

The magenta of the shape shivers in the air, for a moment.

The wind ripples through the grass in waves of copper.

_Hiss._

The circle collapses. Shreds of magenta fall like ash to the grass. The smell of burning metal lingers behind in the air, as if etched into the fall of the light.

Amity’s fingers dig like a vise into her arm. She might scream.

“Amity!”

She _does_ scream. Books toppling around her, she vaults backwards off the log, a weighty tome raised in one hand as a weapon, the other drawing a spell circle to summon forth an abomination, already clambering halfway out of the ground.

Fronds of feather-tipped grass swaying around her, Luz cowers beneath the dappled light. “I’m so sorry! I only looked at one question on your homework, and that was because Eda boiled mine for lunch, and I didn’t even finish reading it because your homework started attacking me!”

Falteringly, Amity lets the spell circle dissipate. “Luz?”

The sounds of scattered cheering and the griffin’s screams drift from the grudgby field. The abomination seeps back into the earth, crackling pink energy closing around it. Purple mud colors the grass in its wake.

“I’m sorry,” Amity says, lowering the book. “You scared me.”

Breathing out a sigh of relief, Luz waves her words away. “I’m sorry for scaring you.” The wind wreathes through the garlands and plumes of leaves above. The light, pale, shimmers across the rainbow of Luz’s school uniform. She looks up and around at the delicacy of the trees above them. “I just didn’t expect to find you here.”

Amity remembers herself, suddenly. With an undignified lunge, she hurls herself at the books scattered across the small clearing.

“Oh, you know me, just- just walking through, getting places, like I do! So many places to be!” She swipes at the tomes strewn around the log. She piles them under her arm, laughing nervously. She might be going cross-eyed. “Do I love walking through the woods!”

Luz blinks amidst the whirl of sudden activity, looking lost. “But this isn’t the way to anywhere —”

Amity takes that as her cue to depart in the direction of the school. “It is now!”

“Wait!” From behind her, Luz picks up a book from the grass. “You dropped this —” She breaks off, peering at the faded golden lettering on the cover. When she looks up again, her eyes are wide with wonder. “You guys are allowed to study wild magic here?”

Amity stops cold. The wind whispers through the brush around her, a soft, sighing sound.

Wheeling back around, she snatches the book from Luz’s grip. She jams it under her arm. “We’re not,” she bites out acidly.

The light swirls around them, illuminating the questions flickering across Luz’s face.

Amity’s breaths are tight. She digs her fingers into the hem of her uniform, preparing to defend herself.

Luz blinks; and then, she steps back, lowering her gaze. The moss spills in burgundies and rich purples down the sides of the trees. The grass curls around her, a soft presence, as she considers.

“I just noticed that I haven’t seen you at lunch with your friends lately,” she says at last. “So… I thought I’d look for you. It’s the Plant Track’s annual Grow-Off today! Willow’s in charge of managing the festivities this year, and so she and Gus and I have been having a great time! Willow’s been showing us which plants we can eat, and which ones will poison our mortal foes, and there are vines with big, springy leaves you can jump on like trampolines, and people are battling their plants at the center in an arena! We placed bets on who was gonna win.” Here, she looks to the side, bringing a hand up to the back of her head. “I have to help Gus dig a tunnel under Hexside now.”

Amity stares at the girl before her, standing very still. She swallows, her throat dry.

“I’d forgotten,” she says, finally. “That that was today.”

“Well, it’s time to un-forget now!” With a bounce, Luz grabs her by the arm and begins to drag her towards the school. “Come on! Those violently spicy lemons won’t stay hot forever!”

“Wait wait wait, Luz, wait!” Amity pulls her arm back, nearly toppling over from the weight of the books beneath her other arm in the process. She takes a moment to steady herself. “I was actually busy with something else —”

“Oh?” Luz turns towards her, folds her arms, and narrows her eyes. “What ‘something else?’”

Amity hesitates. Her eyes dart sideways to the books tucked beneath her arm.

“… Training.”

It’s not exactly a lie.

Luz’s eyes narrow further. “… At lunch.”

Amity begins to consider possible escape routes. “… Yup.”

Luz’s gaze could bore holes through trees. “… Instead of eating.”

A beat.

“You know, eating is really quite overrated. I mean, pfft, who needs nutrition? Certainly not me —”

_“Amity.”_ The grip upon Amity’s arms is sudden. Luz’s face swims into view, very close, alight with concern. “You can’t let your studies get in the way of taking care of yourself, or being with your friends. I know how important magic is to you — but it’s not worth it if you have to shut yourself off from everyone.” The light falls from above, breaking into pieces around them, like colored glass. “You come first, before anything else.”

Leaves swirl in the wind around Amity, and the grasses ripple as if reposed beneath the sea, and Amity is very, very still.

The clouds drift across the sky, carried by the wind. Amity wonders that no one ever thinks of them — no one, except Luz.

She looks up at Luz, shakingly.

“Luz! There you are!”

With a sharp breath, Amity jumps back. Willow and Gus burst through the trees, running to Luz.

“We’ve been looking everywhere for you,” says Willow. “Thank goodness Gus saw which way you went.”

Gus flashes a thumbs-up, rakes the leaves from his hair, and pulls out a handful of chalk-white nuts. Lengthy spikes protrude from their shells. “We brought you the last of the painstachios.”

For a moment, Luz blinks, distantly; then, she smiles. “Aww, thanks guys,” she says, delicately taking one from Gus. “I was worried they were gonna run out.”

“So what’d you disappear all of a sudden for?” Gus asks as the clouds pass by, far above, in the sun.

And Amity wonders, in that moment, what exactly it is that she’s missing; what part others have, perhaps somewhere by their hearts, where she has only empty space. Maybe it’s why she’s always felt like an automaton, surrounded by so many vibrant, living things.

Luz looks at her through the scattered light, and Willow and Gus’s eyes follow, and Amity thinks of the rain: how it washes away ghosts.

_BOOM._

The earth shakes. The leaves of the trees rustle.

Bits of paving stone fly through the air.

One clatters through the branches to land in the grass at Amity’s feet.

A bestial scream cleaves the sky.

“What was that?” Luz yelps. Above, petals swirl, innumerous, across the sky.

Tall, crimson grasses waving around her in the wind, Willow whirls back towards the school. “I leave for _five minutes —”_

An explosion of spiraling, thorn-laced vines, flowers, trees bursts out of the ground. Dirt and grass fly as plants erupt all around, and branches snap from the trees above as the storm of greenery swirls into the sky. Fruits, twigs, and sap rain down upon Amity. She sees Willow helping Luz off the ground amidst the maelstrom of leaves. Tatters of colorful fabric from the Grow-Off’s tents and stands flap between the plants’ teeth as they rear into the sky and scream.

A painstachio lands in the nearest one’s mouth. The spikes upon its shell explode in a blast of noxious white smoke.

“Eat _pain!”_ Gus crows.

With a cry, Luz whips out a fan of glyphs, sets her own painstachio on fire, and charges towards a plant bristling with blades. _“COME AT ME, YOU BIG ARTICHOKE!”_

Amity wonders if she’ll ever understand.

She lifts a hand up into the air, draws a spell circle, and brings her other hand into a fist. The towering hand of abomination goo closes around a braid of vines and flings it to the side.

She raises an abomination out of the remnants of the hand as it drips back down to the ground. She draws another spell circle. The fireball crackles to life in her hand.

_“Abomination, fight!”_ she commands, hurling the spell into the swirl of plants.

The smell of freshly-cut grass is sharp upon the wind. Leaves and blasts of magic fly. A rain of thorns spills from the canopy of twisting trees and vines, ricocheting off every surface. Brambles bloom like tides from the earth. Amity leaps amidst them, shielding herself with a force field spell, and directs her abomination forward with a sweep of her hand. Prismatic leaves fall in a shower of color, and mists of magic hang upon the wind, giving the air a glassy, unreal quality, crackling at the edges. Amity dodges a flytrap’s bite as her abomination lobs its head at a garland of flowers. She leaps into the air, above an eruption of briars, and slings a fireball at the trunk of a colossal tree. Brilliant pink flames surge outwards from the explosion.

She lands, lightly, upon the ground again. Rose-pink embers scatter around her.

A flower bursts from the ground behind her, resplendent with fangs. Its petals, spear-sharp, whistle through the air as it lunges.

A vine wraps around its center, pulls it up by the roots, and flings it through the air. Willow brings the vine back down to the ground again with a flick of her hand, and then sends a volley of sharpened leaves at a pride of dandelions.

Amity blinks, for a moment. She looks down.

Overhead, illusory copies of Gus dash between the vast leaves and branches. Willow raises a curtain of vines from the earth around her, and then slams a hand upon the ground. A towering plant, its barbs like icicles, rises from the ground beneath her. From atop its leaves, she sends the swirl of vines forth, and lifts a field of vividly-colored, fanged flowers from the ground. Great storms of greenery claw through the air, and the sky splits before spires of thorn and leaf, branches jagged as lightning.

With a rustle of leaves, Luz bursts out from the boughs of a many-eyed tree. “Hey, Amity! Watch this!” She slaps a glyph onto the trunk of the tree. The sheets of paper strung about its branches and leaves glow to life in a dazzling array of brilliantly-colored lights.

Amity stares, raising an eyebrow. The lights blink back.

“Get it? It’s a Christmas tree — _augh!”_ The newly-festive tree hurls Luz from its branches.

A snarl of vines bursts out from the swirl of foliage. It coils around Luz, mid-air. The light colors the air in patches. The vines pull her up beyond the trees, out of sight.

Leaves flutter downwards, and a light glyph.

_“LUZ!”_

A vine slams into Amity’s side. The blow knocks her out of the trees, into the open light.

Plants spill down Hexside’s facade. Vines leap from pinnacle to pinnacle in great skeins of thorn, and leaves swirl across its walls. Petals cascade through the air. An amalgamation of plants, timeworn with moss, looms like an endless thing above the school. Twisting bark and chasms of shadowed ferns coalesce as one towards the light. Its fangs curve like the moon.

The earth shakes. Softly, Hexside’s banners flutter. Amity pulls herself from the paving stones, shreds of pink flame dripping from her fingers. “Luz? _Luz!”_

The amalgamation moves; an inconceivable sound echoes forth from its caverns. Its vines lift Luz into the sky, the open sweep of the wind.

The branch of a collapsing tree catches Amity across the body, flinging her into the air.

It’s strange: the way the Titan’s bones are always hid from the sky by snow. Starlight too faint to see sinks down to rest amidst the ice crystals. The amalgamation opens its jaws wide. Through the petals, Luz falls.

The clouds are vast across the endless space of the sky.

Amity’s breaths are cold; and then, it’s simple.

She draws a spell circle with one hand, and then with the other. She brings them together before her, angled towards one another.

The magenta of the shapes glows softly, for a moment.

The wind sweeps around her.

Like pale, morning mist, the circles dissipate into the light.

She hits the ground.

Petals tumble to the stone all around her. The midday light shines through the tatters of the Grow-Off’s tents. High above the spires of the school, luminous, pink wings unfurl around Luz, like an early sunset.

A fathomless howl reverberates across the woods and hills as Luz narrowly swoops past the amalgamation’s jaws, and, with a flap, soars up into the air again.

A hawk’s screech rends the air. A shadow darkens the treetops of the amalgamation. Splitting the wind before it, breathing spiders, the school’s griffin dives towards the towering colossus, noon-light polishing its feathers silver.

As the two collide, and trees shatter, and feathers swirl, a troupe of ghostly Guses jumps from the griffin’s back, planting seeds amidst the branches and rifts of ancient wood.

Beneath the trees to the side of the school, Willow snaps.

Vines blossom across the vast, sweeping canopy of the amalgamation. Heavy with flowers, they spill like water to the ground, brilliant beneath the light. They anchor themselves to trees and to Hexside’s spires like a net. Great, billowing leaves tumble upon the wind, and fragments of wood fall through the air. A flash of pink dives from the sky.

Weaving between branches, darting past vast realms of fern and vine, Luz wreathes the labyrinthine canopies and wooded caverns with glyphs, and soars into the sky.

The explosion lights up the shadows beneath the Titan’s bones. Petals flutter amidst the smoke as the colossus of plants crashes to the ground, throwing ash into the air.

The thunderous sound fades, after a moment, into the breeze.

Ashes settle like snow.

Coughing, Amity pulls herself from the ground.

There are leaves drifting, some still glowing with fire, through the shadowy, swirling quiet. A carpet of petals and ash stirs softly underfoot in the wind. The midday light filters through the smoke in wavering beams. Distantly, leaves ripple across Hexside’s walls, small, snow-white flowers blooming around its windows, like raindrops.

Amity brushes the ash from her uniform.

A blur of pink cuts through the smoke, catching sunbeams, landing before Amity in an eruption of petals.

_“Amity!”_

Luz hurls forward, and her wings dissolve away into the light, and her arms are warm around Amity.

The winds have begun to lift away the smoke, brushing the gray from the sky.

“Are you alright?” Luz asks, pulling back, her hands still upon Amity’s arms. “Are you hurt? The explosion went everywhere, and I didn’t know where you were, and I realized I never even got to tell you what a Christmas tree was —”

There are a great many things spinning about within Amity’s chest. She wonders whether the earth around them is really rising to meet the sky. “I’m fine, Luz,” she says, “I’m fine, I’m here now —”

“Did anything hurt you?” Luz punches a fist into the air. “I will _end_ whatever hurt you!”

“I’m _fine,_ Luz, really, I —” Amity blinks, shakes her head, and fixes her gaze upon Luz. “Are _you_ alright? That thing nearly ate you!”

Swaggering, Luz folds her arms across her chest. “That big thing? Not even close! I grew these, like, _wings_ at the last moment, and —”

She breaks off. She blinks into the smoke.

She looks, sideways, at Amity.

“Not even close,” she says again, quieter.

The ground beneath them rumbles. A flower bursts from the paving stones in a spray of ash. Its petals unfold like rays of sun. Willow and Gus stagger forth from within, burdened beneath tangles of singed vine, drooping fruit, and fangs.

“We bring you… _the spoils of war!”_ Gus hefts the greenery above his head towards the sky.

“We’re cleaning,” Willow corrects.

Willow sets down her half of the plant material, then helps Gus to do the same, urging him to part with a bundle of fangs larger than himself (“We can pick out battle trophies later”). She looks up again, smoke metamorphosing in the sunbeams around her. “We saw what happened. Luz… I’m so sorry I couldn’t get there in time.” She turns to look at Amity. There’s something quiet in her eyes. “Amity… Where did you learn to cast a spell like that?”

The winds roll down from the sky to curl around them, sweeping the petals into the air.

Amity looks up at the clouds.

“I didn’t… learn it, from anywhere.” The smoke shifts, draping her in sunlight. She ducks her head. “I… created it?”

The light is bright around her.

From within the pile of discarded vegetation, Gus bursts out, armed to the teeth with fangs. “But no one’s done that since the Savage Ages!”

Luz looks very faraway. The sun flickers across her. She casts her eyes up towards the sky. Her words are very quiet.

“I thought I’d seen…”

She pulls her sketchpad from her pocket. She begins to draw.

The glyph is a spacious, sweeping thing. It lifts itself up from the page, glowing softly white, as Luz activates it. It vanishes in the sun.

Pale, mist-light feathers, brown and white, marked with gray, settle about Luz’s shoulders, silver with wind, nearly ethereal in the light.

The wind sweeps through the hills and the wild of the forests, and carries their leaves to every part of the Isles, and Amity wraps her arms around herself, dropping her gaze, and watches the ashes swirl, eddying through beams of sun. The light of an ancient star casts down upon her. “I know it’s not the same as having your own staff.” She thinks of the color of sunsets, the order in which the stars light up the night sky. She ducks her head further. “But —”

The movement nearly knocks her off her feet. Luz wraps her in a tight hug, owl’s feathers hovering around her.

In a sweep of wing, Luz leaps off the ground. Ash and smoke whirl in her wake.

Amity blinks, a bit. She tries to remember how to breathe.

The last of the haze over the school rises towards the sun. The clouds, beyond, are brilliant against the blue. A blur of sunlit color wreathes through the trees, scattering leaves and light, spirals past Hexside’s windows and towers, soars into the sky, radiant against the clouds. Forests past curl upon the wind, and demons, blue as glass, wheel between the rivers of leaves like raindrops, long-forgotten. Framed by sunlight, Willow brushes a curl of greenery from her uniform, smiling softly up at the sky. Completely outfitted by now in fangs and drooping vines, smeared in green war paint, Gus leaps, cheering, atop the pile of vegetation, grudgby flags brandished in one hand, a flower, rife with teeth, lifted in the other towards the sky.

High above, in the sun, the dash of color curves across the sky; then, swerves, just below the clouds, to plummet back down towards Hexside, and land, in a rush of leaf and wind, amidst the petals, wings like molten gold in the light.

The winds have tossed Luz’s hair about every which way.

“Amity! You’ve gotta come with me!”

Amity wonders if the explosion has affected her hearing.

She grabs, uselessly, at the sleeve of her uniform.

“I — what?”

The sun, from so many worlds away, is golden upon Luz, and she throws her arms out before her, petals scattering from the motion, like stars cleaved from the sky. “It’s so incredible up there! It’s like I never woke up this morning, and kept on dreaming! I can see everything — the Owl House, the ruins on top of the Knee, the waves in the sea from every direction —” She tosses her gaze towards the clouds above. She seems, nearly, to collapse — _“Amity,_ I nearly touched the clouds! You’ve gotta come see them with me!”

There are points in Amity’s life where she feels as if she doesn’t belong. There’s an unbearable lightness in her bones. Something splits: the gravity of the known world.

Luz crosses her arms, folds her wings behind her back, and turns away, stubbornly, towards the sky. “I’m not going anywhere without you!”

And it hits Amity, then: that stars fall so as to breathe the same air as the trees, and to light up the ripples in forest pools. All the leaves of forests past whisper around her in the wind, as if coming home.

She lifts a hand up into the air. The trees are bright as she draws a spell circle, and then another, bringing them together.

Her wings are the color of the last of the light on the clouds.

She lifts herself, lightly, off the ground. The sky is full of clouds.


End file.
